“I’m not that petty. A woman scorned. Really, Avery?” She strode through the foyer, threw open the front door, and gestured down the empty road. I stepped out front, looking into the trees, but I didn’t see anything. “Do you know what’s happening here while you act like Grant Loman’s little puppet? Do you know what’s happening to the rest of us as you watch him buy up more and more and more?”

I shook my head, because I didn’t. I knew Grant’s accounts deeply. Knew his hopes and aspirations for this place and my role within it. I knew people had been pissed when I sold my grandmother’s house to him, but I did not know what Faith was talking about.

“I finished my degree this May, and I come back home to work, and I discovered the B&B is totally in the red. Not just a little. Like unsalvageable. My parents took out a second mortgage for the expansion a couple years back, thinking they could recoup it with the new units. But we can’t. Not with all the other options out there.” She looked out the window. “We were supposed to expand here, did you know? We put a bid on these properties, were going to have this be an annex of the main building. But we didn’t get them. The properties are all under contract, some LLC.” Her upper lip pulled up past her teeth.

“I’m not working for them anymore. Believe me, I—”

“And you.” She stepped closer, fixing her anger on me. Walking down the front porch step, forcing me back in the process. “You, this complete fuck-up . . .” She cringed, then shook her head to herself. “I’m sorry, but you were. This complete nobody. Now you’re running the show? When people like me, who do everything right, get the degree, serve their time—we come back here to nothing? Excuse me for doing something about it. I’m just trying to reclaim what’s mine.”

“By what?” And then I understood. She was trying to spook the visitors. Hit the Lomans’ bottom line where it hurt. Our bottom line, as far as she was concerned. I didn’t know whom she was angrier with—them or me. Or maybe everything was all tied up together, feeding off one another. Me, the person who had hurt her physically; Parker, the one who had broken her heart; the Lomans, destroying her future. Everything broke here.

“Have you been up there? At the Lomans’?”

She threw her hands in the air, as if it were all so obvious. “I’m just trying to find something. Anything. I just want something I can use. I want them out of here.” She was trembling then. “I wanted you out of there. It isn’t fair.” Her voice broke on the last word.

The nights when the electricity had gone out and I’d believed myself alone. Footsteps in the sand, the back door left open, and the feel of someone in the house with me. The flashlight on the bluffs. “You could go to jail,” I whispered. “They could ruin you.” The truth, then. They could ruin anyone.

She sat on the first step, looking down the undeveloped street, legs stretched out in front of her and crossed at the ankles. “Are you going to tell the police?”

I had come here to ask Faith about Sadie, thinking that if I looked her in the eye, I’d know. Instead, she was confessing to something else. Something perhaps unconnected. Meanwhile, I’d given the police the phone, told them everything I knew, and all it had done was turn their focus on me. I didn’t know what else I owed them. Or her.

“I don’t know,” I said. That, at least, was the truth.

“What about them, then?” she asked. “Are you going to tell the Lomans?”

“I’m not speaking to them right now. They’re not speaking to me. I don’t work for them anymore. I was fired.” I didn’t owe the Lomans anything. Maybe I never did.

Her eye twitched with some emotion I couldn’t understand. “I want him to know it was me,” she said.

She had no idea, the depths of my own anger. Or maybe she did. She tipped her head to the side, watching me closely.

“No one’s stopping you,” I said. “Do what you want. But the Lomans, they think they control everything. People, properties, this entire town. They think they’ve earned that right. They think they deserve to know everything. Maybe they don’t.”

If it were me, I’d let them wonder. Let them wake up to footsteps and not be sure. Let that fracture split their night, their lives.

“You need to leave,” I said. “You need to get out of here. Please, just stop. You almost . . . This place, it was full of gas. Someone could’ve gotten hurt.”

“No, no one was supposed to get hurt. Just—no one was even noticing. You didn’t, even, until the candles. No one was doing anything.”

A chill ran through me. All these invisible lives, hidden just out of sight. Even that night at the party, when she was right there, she remained out of frame, hidden behind shadows and broken glass.

“Did you see what happened that night?” I asked.

She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. Then pressed her lips together. What did she think had happened? Did she, like the police, believe I could’ve been involved in Sadie’s death?

“No. Connor told me to leave. I wasn’t about to hang around after that.”

Had those been the footsteps I’d heard that night in the woods? When I called Sadie’s name? Forgetting how so many of us could move like a ghost, undetected and invisible—as we were taught to do.

Still, it was her word. Her word that she’d left the party, gone back home. I stared at her face, trying to see—

The sound of a car engine in the distance pulled my focus. I peered down the road but couldn’t see past the trees.

“Faith, let’s go back to your place.” I pulled her by the sleeve, trying to get her to stand, but she was staring at my hand, clenched in the fabric of her shirt. “The police have been keeping an eye on the house across the street.” I nodded toward the Blue Robin. I wondered if it was the detective even now. If he would find us here and know.

She stood then, her gaze following mine down the road. “I don’t see anyone,” she said.

“Still. We need to go.”

We walked quietly, side by side, around the side of the Blue Robin, back through the path of trees, like two friends. To anyone else, it probably looked like a friendly hike. I waited until we were out of view of the Blue Robin, until I was sure we were alone again, to ask. I kept my voice low. “None of this—the candles, the damage—it’s not about Sadie?”

She stopped walking for a second before continuing. “Sadie? No. No. You thought I could hurt her?”

Could she? I closed my eyes and shook my head, but that was a lie, and she knew it. Anyone could do it. That wasn’t the question here. “If I was going to hurt someone,” she said, not breaking stride, “she would be the last Loman on my list.”

I had missed Faith. She was fierce and honest—how had I not seen her there in the shadows? What was happening at the properties this year had all been about Parker and what the Lomans stood for—not Sadie.

As we emerged into the clearing of the parking lot, she headed toward the back of the house, overlooking the sea.

“Faith. Please. Hate them all you want, but they lost their daughter last year. Is that not enough?”

She looked off to the edge of the cliffs, but I knew how it could be—how you could become so lost in your own anger and grief and bitterness that you can barely see anything else. When she turned back, her eyes were watering, but I didn’t know if that was from the sting of the saltwater wind. “I know you were close to her, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry she’s dead.”

She walked back toward the house, and I headed for my car, the rest of the lot currently abandoned. But all I could think was that Parker’s car had been parked at the B&B the night Sadie died. He could’ve left, sneaked back home, and returned.

“Faith,” I called just before she disappeared from view. “You said a car pulled in to the lot that night, after Parker was here. Who was it?” I wondered if it was Connor who had parked there.

She shook her head. “I didn’t get a good look. There were two people walking to the party. I only know that one of them was in a blue skirt. I could see it in the moonlight.”

Faith continued inside, the sound of her footsteps echoing on the wooden steps out of view.

I tried to think who had worn a blue skirt that night. Most people were in jeans, khaki shorts, a few sundresses with jackets over the top. It was impossible to remember what clothing people had worn. I could barely remember my own. There was only one person I knew by heart.

I closed my eyes and saw Sadie spinning in the entrance of my room. What do we think of this? Her blue dress, shimmering. You know you’ll freeze, right? Pulling on my brown sweater over the top.

Goose bumps rose in a rush.

From behind, from where Faith had stood, it would’ve looked like Sadie was wearing a skirt.

And suddenly, I saw Sadie take out her phone, seeing the message I sent: Where are you? And then: ???

I saw her with the clarity of a memory instead of my imagination. Saw it with a fervor that made it perfectly true. Frowning at her phone, sending me that message—the last one, the one I never received. The dots lighting up my phone:

I’m already here.

SUMMER

?????2017

The Day After the Plus-One Party